University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Celebrating A Big Year
April 30, 2007 | Baseball
April 30, 2007
By Adam Lucas
This is a busy year for Reece Holbrook. On Friday, he'll turn five, which just happens to be the same day Spider-Man 3 is released to theaters. A birthday and a new Spider-Man movie on the same day? Toss in a couple of cupcakes and you've got the ingredients for a perfect 24 hours.
Five years old seems like a milestone. It marks the beginning of kindergarten, and Reece will start school this fall. A 4-year-old is a preschooler. A 5-year-old goes to the same school as 10-year-olds, which is practically a teenager, which is practically old enough to drive, which...
Hold on. Take just a second to marvel at this. A little less than three years ago the Holbrooks had to think of everything in terms of the next doctor's appointment, the next treatment, the next spinal tap. Looking months or years down the road was for other kids. In the fall of 2004, it was about making everything OK right now. We all spend time imagining the futures for our children. What if the doctors handed you a bunch of medical printouts and told you they couldn't guarantee that future?
So now you can appreciate what a big year this will be. There will be school, and there will be Spider-Man, of course, and there will be no more doctors.
Well, there will always be doctors. After all, Reece now counts Dr. Stuart Gold among his closest buddies, and that's a friendship built over the last three years that goes way beyond needles or test tubes. So he'll still know doctors. He just won't have to make appointments with them. This fall, his three-year treatment cycle will be finished.
There was a time when those treatments first started that friends didn't know what to do. You can only make so many dinners, send so many cards, give so many hugs. So they did the only thing they knew to do: they started a golf tournament. The Reece Holbrook Golf Classic was envisioned as a small gathering of mostly friends. It's turned into a spring highlight that this year raised $180,000, the best total in its short history. The three-year cumulative total is over $425,000.
Reece hangs out with Carolina royalty. Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge, Eric Montross, Hubert Davis, Brandan Wright, and Dewey Burke were all part of the event. Roy Williams returned home from a recruiting trip Sunday night at 1:15 a.m., and he was already on the Chapel Hill Country Club course early Monday morning ready to tee off. Woody Durham auctioned a collection of one-of-a-kind Tar Heel sports items for nearly three hours Sunday night, eventually hammering down over $125,000 worth of bids at the Hampton Inn and Suites.
The auction was sponsored by Roy and Wanda Williams. Once they signed on, they immediately set about making sure it was the best event of its kind. As late as last week, the head coach was still tossing out new ideas. "Hey, do you think anybody would buy a couple of 2008 Final Four tickets?" he said, offering up a pair from his personal allotment. The answer, of course, was yes, and the pair sold for $3,500.
Despite the big names and big dollars, the star remains Reece. He really looks nothing like the three-year-old who nearly decapitated Joe Bray with an errant drive at the first RHGC. Then he looked more like a baby. Now it's his dad sporting the shaved head. And now most traces of that baby are gone, because in his plaid golf pants, custom shoes and custom clubs, Reece looks more like an adult.
Plays golf like one, too. As he was showing off his swing Monday morning, a couple bystanders made the mistake of carrying on a conversation. Just like Tiger, he would not stand for any distractions.
"Can we have quiet, please?" he said. "Can't you see I'm trying to golf?
We see it, Reece. And we can't wait to see the rest of your extraordinary year.
To learn more about Reece, the RHGC, or make a donation, visit the official RHGC website.
Adam Lucas's third book on Carolina basketball, The Best Game Ever, chronicles the 1957 national championship season and is available now. His previous books include Going Home Again, focusing on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.
